Have a Healthy Relationship with Your Local Pub

no sobriety in barsModeration makes the world go round. The more we learn about mental health, the more we come to realize that it depends on a delicate balance between many life elements. Addiction is the opposite of maintaining a healthy balance of anything. Addiction means all your eggs are in one particularly useless basket. Even if the object of your addiction is healthy in moderation, an addiction to it makes it toxic to your health, relationships, sense of purpose and general well-being.

When you apply this life fact to alcoholism, you end up with every reason to recover from alcoholism and no good reason to continue it. Alcoholism forces you into a life of slavery and servitude. Many people start drinking as a way of rebelling against rules and declaring their own personal independence. Ironic, that so many end up prisoners to an alcohol addiction. At first, they believe it is a harmless good time, but it is not long before their drinking becomes a pattern and a way of escaping life stress. At this point, alcohol begins to steal a person’s quality of life.

Quitting an alcohol addiction is not easy for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there are triggers everywhere. Canadian society has a love affair with alcohol. It is marketed, sold and pressured onto us exponentially, and is so widely available that the average person in Canada does not have to venture outside of one kilometer in order to find it. Alcohol that is sold in bars comes with another sale as well; a more subtle one. Bar owners want their customers to feel normal and accepted, even if some of them are perhaps around slightly more often than is healthy. They facilitate the idea that the bartender is every customer’s friend, and that every night a person spends in their bar is a hip, fashionable one. They do not want alcoholics to realize the truth about themselves because they keep bars open in slow times.

The truth is simple. You have the power to refrain from being a “bar fly“. The good feelings a bar supplies you are an illusion. The only real sustainable good feelings are the ones you achieve when you cope with stress in a healthy fashion instead of trying to escape from it. If you are a Canadian who is struggling with alcoholism and feel you are ready to reach out for help, consider the services of a Vancouver rehab center, a Toronto alcoholism treatment program or a Calgary detox facility.

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